


coda: i always find what i need

by haloud



Series: skeleton key [2]
Category: Octopath Traveler (Video Game)
Genre: Character Study, Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Nightmares, Relationship Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-21
Updated: 2018-10-21
Packaged: 2019-08-05 11:37:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16367147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haloud/pseuds/haloud
Summary: Alfyn, haunted by all he almost lost, has a little trouble sleeping. Therion had promised to stay, and Alfyn trusted him with his life—that wasn’t the problem.What if Alfyn didn’t deserve that promise?





	coda: i always find what i need

**Author's Note:**

> title comes once again from Skeleton Key by Dessa

Therion didn’t sleep well on the best of nights, so when Alfyn’s own nightmares snatched him cold awake he had to lie extra still and silent, so as not to disturb him.  It was a silly thing, really. Therion would never begrudge him a little comfort, and that comfort—an unwavering gaze, a fine-fingered hand against his jaw, tilting him to press their foreheads together—came with such a quiet bliss of understanding it was hard not to crave it even in his joyful, sunlit hours.  But Therion needed his sleep more than most, considering it was always so hard won.

Besides, they all had nightmares. Alfyn’s weren’t anything special. A vast, empty space, and a wordless, echoing cry. A voice that cracked with agony and despair; a single, lingering, lonely note. It beat at Alfyn’s ribs like a bird in a cage. It slid through his veins like venom, clotting the blood inside his heart. Without fail, it woke him up to heaving lungs and tears pooling in his mouth, even though on other nights he slept straight through the dreams of rotting, exsanguinated bodies—of stakes and ashes and the grease of burning meat—of red eyes and gaping jaws and stone creeping up his legs.

Please, please.  He dreamed of begging, and bargaining, and searching and searching but never finding, and knowing that he hadn’t just failed, he’d abandoned and betrayed and turned his back on and that cry never stopped, just turned high and sobbing and lost at the end and repeated itself again.

If Therion knew, the guilt would eat him up inside. He’d blame himself; he’d think himself weak for ever showing any hint of pain, maybe sequester himself somewhere else when night fell out of fear it was the reminder of his presence that brought the nightmares on. Alfyn couldn’t let that happen, even if it was selfish. His arm tightened around Therion’s waist just at the thought. Therion twisted a bit in the restrictive grip, his hand forming a sharp-knuckled fist over Alfyn’s heart.

A lot of things about the Miguel situation sunk thorns deep into the softest parts of Alfyn, pumping him full of poison: Ogen; the look on that mother’s face when Alfyn handed her child back to her; the blood under his own fingernails. But nothing was as haunting as hearing Therion in those woods and thinking he might be too late. If he’d been just a little slower—if Miguel had been a single drop less cruel—

Well.

If Therion was awake, looking into his eyes and saying, “Stop thinking yourself sick, medicine man,” it wouldn’t be so easy to imagine him spread out on the forest floor, cold and empty and never to wake again.

But he looked so beautiful under the moonlight, and peaceful. _His hair is the color of starlight,_ Alfyn wrote in his last letter to Zeph, scrawled out while everyone was in the tavern waiting for him, a blush simmering in his grinning cheeks. Alfyn has fallen in love a hundred times before.  He fell for merchants that came in and out of town with the seasons. He fell for pretty local girls who knew him too well to do anything but giggle and kiss him on the cheek. He fell for Zeph hard and messy in ways that took a long time to settle right. He fell for Tressa’s determination, Ophilia’s dignity, Cyrus’s careful teaching, and he fell for everyone else in their band without hesitation. Alfyn was a creature made up of little loves stitched together to make something greater than the sum of their parts. He’d just never known how different love could feel until Therion.

This wrenching, desperate urgency was a stranger to him. It made him new in his own skin.

Slowly, Alfyn shifted onto his side to better look at Therion. If he woke now, Alfyn could see the look on his face in his mind’s eye as something torn between fondness and tamped-down fear. As much as Alfyn believed in the power of love, he wasn’t fool enough to think it healed all wounds, and Therion had wounds that Alfyn could barely begin to comprehend, let alone fix. He saw it in the way Therion shrank back from his shadow, made too-large silhouetted against the window. He saw it in the way he moved as they climbed towards Orewell. He saw it in the way wounded animals tore into themselves when they couldn’t run away.

As gentle as if stroking a spider’s web, Alfyn combed his hand through Therion’s hair and swept it to the side.

With all the ways Alfyn had recently found himself lacking, none stung quite as badly as the fact that he’d let that low-down worm-eaten bastard get away. He knew precious little about the actual circumstances surrounding _Darius,_ but he knew enough to know that he was the man who’d thrown Therion away like less than refuse. Alfyn, forgiver of unforgivable things, would have torn him limb from limb if H’aanit hadn’t held him back.

Therion was always putting himself between Alfyn and killings in battle. No matter where he’d been before, in the moments just before the killing blow, he would appear; and a dagger would pierce his quarry’s heart before an ax split them in two. Alfyn couldn’t understand _why._ They were all of them killers, now. Why should Alfyn, out of all of them, be spared that guilt and horror?

What would Therion think of him if he knew that, despite how hard he fought to protect some semblance of innocence still left in his world, Alfyn lie awake at night and wished for blood on his hands?

In sleep, Therion’s face was unlined, his mouth soft and slack and unguarded. Alfyn hated himself a little bit for stealing this glimpse, but he could no more look away than he could bring his mother back to life. Gently, so gently, he tucked Therion’s hair behind his ear so he could stroke his thumb along his cheek. Aelfric, he was so beautiful, felt so perfect resting in the crook of Alfyn’s arm. Alfyn had to bring his other hand to cover his own mouth for fear he might find himself unable to keep from crying.

He looked like nothing less than a creature fallen out of a poem, and Alfyn had been fed too much on poetry.

These thoughts were so unforgivably, monstrously unfair. Therion was just a man like any other, with wants and hurts and fears. It helped no one, least of all Therion himself, to put him on some high pedestal. But if he _were_ some sly, fey creature, then Alfyn had a way forward: a lifetime of storybooks that whispered ways to keep him, to trap him in honey and clover and dew. And storybooks had endings, wrapped up in neat little bows. Storybooks never stared down day after day charging at them like a raging bull.

Therion had promised to stay, and Alfyn trusted him with his life—that wasn’t the problem. What if Alfyn didn’t deserve that promise? What if Therion was hurting himself every single day, taking the burden of Alfyn’s kills onto himself, bearing it all in silence just for a scrap of affection because it’s what he thought Alfyn wanted, all while Alfyn betrayed him by stealing these midnight hours of him unguarded and unaware? The thought was too much to bear; Alfyn wanted nothing more than to run away from it, to run all the way back to Zeph and Nina’s hearth and never set foot outside Clearbrook again, like a true coward. Why did Alfyn get to cry when Therion’s tears were stolen from him?

It just wasn’t _fair._

And night after night Alfyn heard Therion cry out and had to live with knowing he’d been _alone_ there, at what could have been the end…

Unable to restrain himself any longer, Alfyn pulled Therion into a hug and buried his face in the top of his head. One sob finally escaped him, and after the dam broke he couldn’t stop.

“Alfyn?” Therion’s voice drifted up, still blurry from sleep, and it only made Alfyn cry harder.

“Sorry. S-sorry. I’m—sorry.”

“Hey.” Therion squirmed a little bit, freeing himself from where he’d been mushed against Alfyn’s chest so he could see Alfyn’s face, blotchy and tear-stained as it was. “Hey,” he said again, “What happened, medicine man?”

“I’m _sorry.”_

“What are you apologizing for, Alfyn?”

“For _everything_.” Saying it even felt pathetic, but Alfyn didn’t know what else to say. How else could he express everything all tangled up inside him? He was supposed to be the fixer, but there he was falling apart.

“Hey!” Therion lightly smacked his wet cheek then lingered there, pressed against his stubble. “You’re going to have to talk to me. I’m not a mind reader, and I’m not letting you go until you tell me what’s wrong.”

“I didn’t mean to wake you up. It’s the middle of the night and you need your sleep—”

“Well I’m awake now, so—”

“I’m _sorry—”_

“Alfyn, stop.”

His eye searched Alfyn’s face, lips slightly parted like he didn’t know what to say. The scar across his other eye pulled to the side when his brow furrowed in concern.

“I know how you feel about that scar, but I still…”

As Alfyn began to speak, Therion’s hand touched his own bare cheek, the hair tucked behind his ear, like he hadn’t felt the night air on his skin. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed, and he dropped eye contact.

“It’s okay. Hey, I know it’s not much to look at, but it doesn’t do much for a man’s ego when his boyfriend breaks down at the sight of his face. Maybe I should be the one apologizing.”

“No!” Alfyn’s arms tightened again, crushing Therion to him. “I just shouldn’t have invaded your privacy like that, and I’m sorry.”

Therion fell silent. He picked at a loose thread on Alfyn’s vest. He still hadn’t shaken his hair loose.

“There’s something else,” he said, “Something you don’t want to tell me? I’ll back off, but if it’s got you this upset…”

Too much of a coward to say it to his face, Alfyn hid in Therion’s soft hair again before saying, as quietly as he could manage, “I just want to do right by you, Therion.”

Therion’s hand stilled on Alfyn’s chest.

“I just want everythin’ to be ok,” Alfyn continued, unable to stop his mouth now that it was running. “I know it sounds stupid and naïve, but I just…I’m jus’ so sick of bein’ scared for you, and I know there’s nothin’ I can do but be here and I _will_ be, but I’m so scared I’m not gonna be good enough.”

“You’re so stupid,” Therion said in a soft rasp, “So, so stupid, Alfyn. Like—like that fear and that kind of wanting isn’t more than enough by itself? What more could I possibly ask for? I don’t know how to do any of this. I don’t know what to ask for, I don’t know what to say. How could I expect anything of you?”

“I just want to make you happy.”

“You _do.”_

In shock, Alfyn pulled back from his hiding place. A fierce light glittered in Therion’s eyes now, and it was breathtaking.

“I want to make you happy, too,” Therion said, “I want to protect you; I want to be there for you. And all those things. We feel the same. That’s enough for me. Is it enough for you?”

The last of the tears that had been clinging to Alfyn’s lashes welled up and spilled over as his mouth hung open, stunned. Though the moonlight washed everything in silver, the pinking of Therion’s cheeks still squeezed Alfyn’s heart until he thought it might burst.

Lacing their fingers together, Alfyn leaned down and kissed Therion, soft as a butterfly’s wing. Therion jumped, just a bit, before opening his mouth under Alfyn’s and pressing up into the contact.

“I love you,” Alfyn whispered against Therion’s lips, and:

“We’ll be okay,” Therion whispered back.

**Author's Note:**

> alfyn is a Good Good Boy and that hurts him sometimes
> 
> you can find me @haloudd on twitter and at haloud.tumblr.com :)


End file.
